Bridgewater State of the art: new BSU science center gets rave reviews

Junior Joe Fitzgerald said BSU’s new state-of-the-art science building is what he’d expect to find at an elite private university and he’s thrilled to have access to it at state school prices.“It’s a beautiful facility and I’m pretty excited to be here,” Fitzgerald of Ea...

Junior Joe Fitzgerald said BSU’s new state-of-the-art science building is what he’d expect to find at an elite private university and he’s thrilled to have access to it at state school prices.

“It’s a beautiful facility and I’m pretty excited to be here,” Fitzgerald of Easton said last week as the fall semester kicked off during an unveiling tour of Phase I of the new $98.7 million, state-funded Science and Mathematics Center at Bridgewater State University.

BSU President Dana Mohler-Faria told Fitzgerald the university recently hosted some faculty from MIT and they said the new center “rivals anything they have.”

“You deserve as excellent an education as someone at MIT or anywhere else,” Mohler-Faria said.

The building as it stands with Phase I complete has two wings and occupies 168,000 square feet.

The second and final phase of the project, already underway and scheduled to be finished in the fall of 2012, entails demolishing a portion of the old science building, renovating the remainder and constructing a third wing on the new facility, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management and Planning Karen Jason said.

At 211,300 square-feet and five stories high, crowned by a rooftop observatory with an 18-foot rotating dome, the new building will be the largest on the campus when completed.

But it will leave a light footprint, Jason said.

The building’s numerous energy-saving and environmentally-friendly elements include passive solar window slats, rooftop solar hot water heaters, prominently placed recycling and water bottle filling stations and many other eco-conscious design elements, she said.

It’s also intended to be an inviting, inspiring place to teach and learn, she said.

The central, multi-story glass atrium looking out on a rain garden, greenhouse and botanical garden create a lovely, cozy “tree-house” effect, she said.

But this isn’t just another pretty place, Mohler-Faria said.

A building of its size would be expected to be outfitted with $4 million to $5 million in new equipment, he said. But $8 million has been spent on technology for the new facility, much of it state of the art, the kind often reserved for graduate students’ use at many institutions, he said.

That equipment includes the confocal microscope on the third floor in the biology department where professors Jeffery Bowen and Meri Krevosky do cancer research, studying apoptosis, the process by which cells kill themselves, an important facet of normal cell development and something cancer cells don’t do when they should, Krevosky said.

“We can get better resolution and do time lapse studies of a cell killing itself,” perhaps gaining insights not possible with less sophisticated equipment, Bowen said.

“These are the kinds of things most undergraduates don’t get the opportunity to do,” said Arthur Goldstein, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics.

Page 2 of 2 - Goldstein said BSU isn’t trying to compete with places like MIT on major scientific breakthroughs.

Instead, true to its history as a teaching college, the university’s focus is on trainings students to go on to make or assist in making the breakthroughs — either as graduate students or in private industry.

“We primarily believe the research is of benefit to our undergraduates as part of their education. And many of them go on to do remarkable things,” Goldstein said.

Junior Ryan Stephansky, 20, of Whitman, is one of those undergraduates. Stephansky, who spent the summer working with the new microscope, said some people may find math and science boring, but to him it’s just the opposite.

“There’s always something new to find. It’s never-ending,” said the biology major whose father Mark Stephansky is a high school science teacher.

As to the new building, Ryan Stephansky said, “The old building was pretty outdated. It’s really a privilege to be here.”